Gordon Wiltsie

Captive wolves near Zarnesti.

CEAUSESCU'S SHADOW still lingers in some places, including the snowed-over road that may or may not eventually carry us to Fata lui Ilie. The forest is thick. The spruce trees are large and heavily flocked with snow. While the Skidoos are mired still again, on another steep switchback below a ridgeline, I wonder aloud whether this route was originally cut for hauling timber.

"No, this was a hunting road for Ceausescu," Christoph tells me. "He'd fly in by helicopter. And his people would come in by four-wheel-drive to organize the hunt." Among other fatuities, Ceausescu prided himself as a great killer of trophy-size bears. Although his name went into record books and his trophies can still be seen at a museum in the town of Posada, Ceausescu's actual accomplishments were contemptible: squeezing off kill-shots at animals that had been located, fattened, and baited for his convenience. The sad irony is that, so long as he arrogated the country's bear-hunting rights largely to himself, the bear population flourished. Records show that it peaked, at about 8,000 animals, in 1989. The end of that year was when the ground shifted for everyone—carnivores, citizens, and the Conducator himself. The people finally revolted, and Ceausescu, losing his nerve, tried to flee but was captured. On Christmas Day, before a firing squad, the great hunter got his.

Farther along, when we pass a spur road to Ceausescu's helicopter pad, I feel tempted to ski up and inspect it. But by now Christoph and Barbara are far ahead on the snowmobiles, Gordon is with them, and I'm skiing through darkness with only Uli's dim headlamp as a point of guidance. Ceausescu is dead, the bears are asleep, the new government is led by a center-right coalition of parliamentarians, the Carpathian forests are being privatized to their great peril, the currency is weak, the mafia is getting strong, and all idle contemplation of the pungent contingencies of recent Romanian history is best left, I realize, for a time when I'm not threatened by hypothermia.